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October 30, 2009

Prospectus Today

A Classic Confrontation

by Joe Sheehan

The best short reliever in postseason history, arguably the best relief pitcher in the game's history, on the mound. The best second baseman in baseball, one of the top six players in the game, coming off of a two-homer night, at the plate. Behind him, the greatest left-handed slugger extant. The crowd, 50,000 strong, rising to greet the moment in a beautiful new ballpark on a gorgeous autumn night. One man out. Two men on. A two-run lead in the eighth inning of a World Series game, as close to a must-win for the pitcher's team as the second game of a best-of-seven can be.

We sit through a lot of bad baseball, watch a lot of dreary 8-1 wins, shake our heads at all manner of errors, mental and otherwise, and we do it all for a moment like last night's eighth-inning confrontation between Mariano Rivera and Chase Utley. You can't script the drama in baseball, so sometimes the biggest moments come around and you find Rafael Betancourt pitching to Pedro Feliz. The matchups you want to see often happen in mundane situations. Last night, though, we had the setting for greatness, and we had players to match, and we got five minutes of hold-your-breath, bite-your-lip, too-scared-to-cheer tension as Rivera and Utley battled through seven pitches, a sequence in which they traded the upper hand twice—going from 1-0 to 1-2 and on to 3-2—as Rivera danced around the edges of the strike zone and Utley waited patiently for a pitch he could drive. There was a quiet intensity to the moment, two players known for excellence with an absence of flamboyance, professionals in the best sense of the word, executing against one another as a season hung in the balance.

Rivera won the matchup, getting Utley to ground into a double play that may have benefited from a bad call at first base. He then dodged a bullet in the ninth inning, allowing a double that brought the tying run to the plate before getting the 27^th out. On this night, Rivera would once again cue Metallica with his entrance and Sinatra with his exit, the kind of book-end music combination you usually only find on Weird Al Yankovic albums. "Enter Sandman" may be Rivera's signature tune, but it's the frequency with which he ends his workday to the sound of Ol' Blue Eyes that had made him a legend of the game, and a hero in the Bronx.

Rivera would not have been in position to get the last six outs had A.J. Burnett not crushed the job of getting the first 21. It certainly wasn't the best start of his career, but Burnett may never have executed a game plan as thoroughly as he did last night. Taking the mound amid concern over what a Phillies team—one that loves fastballs and loves getting into hitters' counts—could do to the sometimes erratic, always hard-throwing Burnett, the righty defied all expectations with two pitches: first-pitch strikes and a sharp, backdoor breaking ball that froze left-handed hitters all night. The Phillies had a plan—the first seven hitters took the first pitch—and Burnett beat it—he started the first 11 hitters with a strike, and 22 of the 25 batters he faced 0-1. A.J. Burnett often has innings where he is 1-0 to four or five batters. He was 1-0 three times all last night. Almost every time he was in a key spot in the game, he made a great pitch to get out of it. We started the night wondering what Pedro Martinez might do to amaze us, and instead got mesmerized by the unexpected. How very like baseball.

It's not like Martinez didn't put on a show. Ranging up and down the velocity table, Martinez worked primarily off of his changeup to keep the Yankees off-balance all night. He allowed two runs in his first six innings, and probably should not have been allowed out for the seventh inning to give up his third. The outing was exactly what Martinez has done in his best work since joining the Phillies in July: pitching backwards, pitching from behind, but using such a wide array of pitches thrown at disparate velocities and locations to keep the opposition from squaring up balls. The two Yankee homers came off of good pitches, the first a changeup on the outer half of the plate that Mark Teixeira went out and got, yanking it over the fence in right-center. The second came on a curve well down and in on which Hideki Matsui had to clear out his entire front side to golf it into the right-field seats. Martinez beat himself up a bit for that one, saying, "I was disappointed because maybe the pitch wasn't the one I would probably have chosen if I were to think again." Perhaps, but Matsui really had to work to get the ball out of the park.